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I find it better to develop locally, but shared hosts that provide Rails support typically give you shell access. From the shell you can access RI, IRB (Including script/console and the like.") and the Ruby interpreter.

No I agree with Luke. We're not saying you need to have a dedicated server, rimuhisting do a VPS server for $20 a month which is a similar price to most quality shared hosting plans.

The difference between a rails and php site is that php interprets static resources through an interpreter, whereas a rails application persists between requests. Therefore someone else running a dodgy rails app on your shared hosting box can be swallowing up all your resources.

A VPS offers the same benefits of shared hosting but the system resources are partitioned so only your apps can use your resources.

You then have the added benefit of being able to install your own gems and your web server of choice too which is not possible on a shared host.

Well, I just signed up for BlueHost and plan on developing locally, creating (rake) the structure on the shared host, and then upload the individual files that I have locally to the shared host. I am just testing out rails right now anyway (originally from CakePHP), nothing big enough to justify a VPS yet. Thanks for the input.